CVE-2017-12215 Denial of service in Cisco Email Security Appliance
Unauthenticated remote attackers can cause memory exhaustion and service disruption on Cisco Email Security Appliances by exploiting message filtering features.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- None listed
What is CVE-2017-12215?
CVE-2017-12215 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Cisco Asyncos, published on 21 Sep 2017. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
A vulnerability in the email message filtering feature of Cisco AsyncOS Software for the Cisco Email Security Appliance could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause an affected device to run out of memory and stop scanning and forwarding email messages. When system memory is depleted, it can cause the filtering process to crash, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition on the device. This vulnerability affects software version 9.0 through the first fixed release of Cisco AsyncOS Software for Cisco Email Security Appliances, both virtual and hardware appliances, if the software is configured to apply a message filter or content filter to incoming email attachments. The vulnerability is not limited to any specific rules or actions for a message filter or content filter. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCvd29354.
Weakness: CWE-20
Which versions are affected by CVE-2017-12215?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Cisco Asyncos.
How do I fix CVE-2017-12215?
No fix has been published for CVE-2017-12215 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2017-12215 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2017-12215 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Cisco Asyncos
- CVE-2025-20393 Cisco Multiple Products Improper Input Validation
- CVE-2026-76519 Cisco Secure Email Gateway Relative Path Traversal
- CVE-2026-76461 Cisco Secure Email Gateway SQL Injection
- CVE-2024-20435 Command injection in Cisco Secure Web Appliance
- CVE-2019-15956 Cisco Web Security Appliance Unauthorized Device Reset Vulnerability
Sources
Also known as GHSA-wx6j-j2jv-h7c4.